People

Sobia Ahmad’s interdisciplinary practice investigates how our deeply intimate struggles of belonging can inform larger conversations about national identity, notions of home, cultural memory, and gender. By weaving personal and communal narratives with current and historical socio-political contexts, she highlights the inseparability of the self and larger power structures. Through imbrications of inherited memories and ancestral knowledge, she reimagines ancestral rituals as acts of liberation in contemporary contexts.

Born and raised in Pakistan, Sobia Ahmad moved to the United States at the age of fourteen. She holds two bachelor’s degrees from the University of Maryland College Park— B.S. in Behavioral & Community Health and B.A. in Studio Art. Her work has been reviewed in several major publications such as Al-Jazeera English, The Washington Post, and The Huffington Post. She has exhibited internationally—including at the Craft and Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, New York, Queen Mary University in London, and the Women Filmmakers Festival at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Recent achievements include the Wherewithal Research Grant by the Washington Project for the Arts (2020-2021), a socially-engaged fellowship at Halcyon Arts Lab (2019), and a solo exhibition at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington DC (2019).